Discover our tea & literature pairing for March. It's a decadent duo!

We recommend the book Mãn by Kim Thùy

Mãn is a love story between a woman and those who, in turn, gave birth to her, breastfed her, and raised her. She was left in the vegetable garden of a Buddhist temple on the banks of one of the Mekong's tributaries by a teenage girl. A nun took her in and fed her with water, rice, and milk from a neighboring mother's breast, before entrusting her to another woman—a teacher by day, a spy at all times.

Mãn speaks of love in reverse, the kind that must remain silent, the kind that cannot be lived, the kind that must not be inscribed in time as memories, as stories. Yet, just before the end, or in the middle of a new beginning, elsewhere, far from the tropical heat, close to the body, in the airy slowness of snowflakes, there was a love in the right place, that is to say, an ordinary love born of an ordinary encounter, with an ordinary man, which was for her the extraordinary, the improbable.

Mãn is the learning of the word "to love" to follow up on the definition of the verb "to live" in À toi and the conjugation of "to survive" in Ru.